"THE culture in South Africa has become so deformed that we no longer have respect for the rights of others." - Police Commissioner George Fivaz.

WE'VE said it before. We say it again. Mr Mandela's "New SA" is a great place to be a crook: now more than ever. Thanks, of course, to the ANC government's grotesque paralysis of will or inability to carry out its basic public duties, such as protection of the public safety. No state on earth has failed as dismally as this to meet the fundamental test of any civilisation: to enforce law and order, to protect the lives and property of its citizens.

As APN has endlessly reiterated, the core function of government - the protection of lives and property - is here being seriously neglected. More than that, government at all levels is seemingly run by people who no longer perceive that protection as the core function of government. Instead, government now concentrates on protecting the victimiser, not the victim.

Now, today, we are at last in full crisis. As this is written, the print media is dedicating copious columns detailing the virtual collapse of the SA Police Service and the criminal justice system generally. It is such a big story, its ramifications so vast, so profound, that what is happening is still difficult fully to comprehend.

First question, obviously, is how on earth did a country so recently one of the most orderly on earth descend so fast into a state of criminal anarchy, far outstripping that of any other so-called civilised society on earth?

Messrs Mandela, Mbeki, Justice Minister Dullah Omar and Safety & Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi, all are happy to blame apartheid and the previous government: but remain significantly silent on their own role in helping create this crime panic.

Let's quickly backtrack in history, to the early Bolsheviks and their League of the Just, later the Communist League. That League farsightedly saw its best hope of grabbing power as being on the back of murderous lawlessness, of declaring war on the Tsar's system of law and order, of spreading fear and mayhem across the land. One of the League's leaders, Wilhelm Weitling, called it: "Founding the kingdom of heaven by unleashing the furies of hell." Anything sound familiar there?

There's little doubt that the late Joe Slovo, the ANC/SACP alliance's main strategist throughout the so-called "struggle years," borrowed many of his tactics from the League of the Just. Crime and unspeakable violence were deliberately used as the main thrust to make SA "ungovernable" in the 1980s, to create a culture of out-and-out lawlessness and general mayhem.

In 1984 crime was unquestionably seen as the weapon of choice in what was then seen as a war of retribution. As a result, many in the ANC/SACP to this day regard law and order as conservative country.

Urban warfare, though this time conducted by thugs, hoodlums, gangsters, drug dealers and other human predators, continues to this day. DP spokesman Peter Leon reckons that the ordinary citizen's chances of being killed in Johannesburg are similar to those of a civilian in a country formally at war. And, as in any real war, real people end up on mortuary slabs.

During the years we suffered "ungovernability," hundreds of policemen were gunned down, tortured, torched, some cannibalised. Thousands more were maimed, blinded or otherwise rendered unfit for further service, this as an example to others. Never the least sign of remorse, not a tear, no sense that any of this was morally wrong.

Commenting on SA's "ungovernability" phenomenon, John Kane-Berman of the Institute of Race Relations recalls Simon Schama's masterful work, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Schama wrote: "The dilemma for successive generations of those revolutionaries who graduated from oratory to administration was that they owed their own power to precisely the kind of rhetoric that made their subsequent governance impossible."

There, stripped of the phoney revolutionary romance, is the root cause of our problem today. We have a government that was brought to power through criminality, a government moreover which was supported throughout its "struggle" by nearly all the world's worst criminal nations: the old USSR, Red China, Cuba, Cambodia, Libya, Iraq, East Germany and the rest.

Today, we have finally to acknowledge that our criminal justice system is indeed broken. But it wasn't the cops who broke it. It was the ruling ANC/SACP, aided and abetted by ultra-liberal judges and lawyers, backed up by the do-gooding, bleeding hearts, human rights crowd. It was their monstrous generosity that handcuffed the police in the execution of their duties; which outlawed the gallows and corporal punishment; which forced the release of tens of thousands of public enemies. It was the do-gooders who have wilfully and systematically demonised the police.

Thanks to these bleeding hearts and excuse-makers, we now have a legal system, plus a badly flawed Constitution, that creates chaos and disdains normal policing, judicial and correctional systems. This to the point where the only growth industry in the country is serious crime: drugs, prostitution, pornography, child abuse, rape, murder, armed robbery and general carnage. On those fronts, we are in a league absolutely of our own. One corporate spokesman says: "South African society is taking an absolute caning." He is right. Every paper you pick details how urban warfare has exploded on a massive scale.

Now let's turn to the burning question. Does this government, busy building what it terms a "human rights society," in fact value human life? Or does it not? My answer is "not." Sure. The present catastrophe didn't just start when the ANC, in a rigged election, took power in 1994. F W de Klerk had previously, for political reasons and to deep public consternation, released criminals from the prisons by the scores of thousands.

Even then, the police had begun losing many of its best operational and managerial skills. Not surprisingly, that wastage has grown a thousand-fold since the ANC takeover, particularly since the State's ill-conceived public service redundancy plan.

In the period January 1994 to October 1996, no less than 19 241 men and women, mostly expensively trained long-service personnel, resigned from the force. Over the last 18 months some 300 to 400 officers have left monthly. Now comes the latest shock. According to The Star, 19.4.97, 3 073 resignations are in progress right now. The biggest percentage of these - 808 - will be lost to Gauteng, the most crime scourged province in the country.

Most are middle- to high-ranking officers, ranging from sergeants to senior superintendents, with ten to 32 years experience. Among those who have already left are the province's head of organised crime; the province's Inspectorate Commissioner; the chief of East Rand Crime Protection; the commander over Gauteng detectives; 12 station commissioners and 20 unit branch commanders.

In Johannesburg - where the drug problem and concentration of drug syndicates is the worst in the country - of the five staff officers in the Narcotics Unit, two are taking packages, the branch commander one of them. In the anti-hijacking unit, three senior officers, including the unit's head, are taking early retirement packages.

A senior police officer commented: "It is the experienced policemen with expertise, the role models, who are leaving us. While the total number is a problem, the real issue is the number of quality, top calibre policemen who are going. The Government has acknowledged that its severance packages policy is a disaster but says it cannot stop it going further till they have something to replace it. The best people are leaving, because they can get jobs elsewhere. Its those who cannot who stay on. It will take years to recover from this loss."

As even the ANC-supporting Star mourns: "These are men the country cannot afford to lose ... (their loss) will rip the heart out of the country's key police leadership."

The impact of the wastage of such expertise and talent is formidably reflected in the huge drops in completed investigations. In 1994 almost 400 000 cases were brought forward from 1993. That figure increased to more than 617 000 by the end of last year. Indicative of just how the police service is now buckling, in Gauteng the rate of completed cases has fallen to 47,6%. Provincial figures indicate that the Narcotics Bureau last year arrested nearly 55% fewer people for drug dealing as compared with 1994.

Why are so many irreplaceable men going, thrusting their once beloved force down into dismal defeat? One senior officer explained that "they could not remain in a force that no longer has direction or discipline ... the powers that be are not interested." Douglas Gibson agrees: instead of determination to put things right, he says, "there is a sense of drift and desperation."

Perhaps it is even worse than that. Results of an internal service survey just released provide a picture of a thoroughly demotivated, confused and demoralised force, suffering under appalling mismanagement. Out of every ten policemen or women on duty, only three are at any given time actively combating crime. The survey showed that 44% of police "did only the absolute minimum of work." Absenteeism and absurdly long study, medical and holiday leave further reduce the force's operational capacity.

A telling 68% had "no confidence in management," another 30% believe that Commissioner Fivaz and his management "lack the knowledge and ability to lead the police service."

It is a grim picture. There is yet another reason for the generally excessively fragile police morale. To a most uncomfortable degree, many of the Mandela Cabinet have displayed a consistent hostility to the police, an attitude vastly compounded by Tutu's Truth & Reconciliation Commission, which for months now has conducted a highly public attempt to at monsterising the police.

One of the worst features of this TRC witch hunt is the daily humiliation of police officers who feel it is in their best interest to seek amnesty. The trauma this is inflicting and the damage and hurt to family relationships it is imposing can scarcely be defined. Malice and race hatred is a TRC constant.

Add to this the frequent abusive attacks on the police in the left/lib media and particularly on TV and it is little wonder that so many police feel that these days they are operating behind enemy lines. No real effort has been made by this government to market the police to the public, to offset the unceasing and hugely damaging anti-police propaganda.

As a journalist I have for many years worked very closely with the police. All I can say is that I have found the vast majority of officers to be honest and good public servants, often indeed, heroes. Who else goes to work every day ready to risk their lives in the service of the public, except cops and firefighters? It sure as hell isn't Mandela, Mbeki, Fivaz, Omar, Tutu, Boraine, the judges or the human rights lobby.

It has long seemed to me that a whole lot of South Africans need to relearn the ability to tell the bad guys from the good guys. That should be a first return to a beginning of sanity and a safe, orderly country.

When Mufamadi, now 38, a former trade union organiser and a member of the central committee of the SA Communist Party, was appointed Minister of Safety & Security in January 1995, few believed him up to the job. He is recently on record as saying that "there is something seriously wrong with the force." Too right. There is. That something is Mufamadi.

Since this so-called "Minister of Safety & Security" assumed control, no South African, White or Black, has enjoyed either safety or security. And, unfortunately, few of his fellow South Africans enjoy the privilege of the reported 16 taxpayer-funded personal bodyguards said to protect this clown and his family.

In yet another of those internal investigations, it was disclosed that at least 64% of police feel that senior management "has no idea of what was happening at grassroots level and that at least 40% are dissatisfied with the way the SAPS are managed." They have much to be dissatisfied about.

In company with Fivaz, Mufamadi has presided over the "transformation" of the force into what could loosely be termed a "community-oriented, human rights service." As part of this process we have seen the ridiculously long-standing moratorium on police recruitment. For three years now, this moratorium has been enforced on new recruits, largely to ensure that vacancies created by retirement, resignation, package or death are duly filled by former MK or APLA "freedom fighters." Affirmative action gone really mad.

After undergoing enlistment proceedings, such recruits go to the Police College for retraining. Overall, their entry into the force has been unmitigated disaster. Early on it was found that many of them, survivors of the ANC's highly prejudicial "no education before liberation" era, did not possess even a Std 4 level of education. Many have AIDS. Levels of discipline were generally abysmal.

Indifferently trained, many of these people have now been drafted into police stations across the country. Barely literate, many have the greatest difficulty in completing an understandable police docket. Statements are often so illegible, so badly worded that they are useless in court. That state of affairs promises to be with us for a long time yet. Of the 140 000 officers now in the force, 30 000 have not passed Std 8, 45 000 cannot drive.

Mufamadi's inadequacies are mirror-imaged by those of his colleague, Comrade Omar, a soured, awkward little Trotskyite most notable for his "the public be damned" attitude. Both men adhere to the culture that grants the criminal a presumption of innocence but assumes the guilt of the cop that arrests him. The more Omar's influence has been brought to bear on the SA legal system, the more its breakdown has become apparent.

Both men have done a lousy job. Both should be axed, notably now when the crime situation is at last exposed in all its enormity. A disturbing factor here is the impression, right or wrong, that many in the ANC hierarchy are not unduly dismayed by the ever-encompassing anarchy, but rather rejoice in the discomfiture of the Whites on the pretext that they deserve it. That it also drives so many Whites out of the country is also seen as a bonus.

Attempting to foster the illusion that the State is doing its job, Mufamadi claims that the latest crime statistics "give us reason for optimism." For example, 107 352 vehicles were stolen last year, 3,3% less than in 1995. Unfortunately, the general crime statistics tell a different, terrifying story: 25 782 murders last year; 118 755 robberies, 51 506 of them involving firearms; 334 301 cases of housebreaking.

Rapes rose from 47 506 in 1995 to 50 481 last year, with many victims, perhaps as many again, unwilling to report cases of sexual violence to the police. The recorded crime rate is 5 651 per 100 000, more than double the international average.

Freedom Front spokesman Joseph Chiole points out that in the past two years as many people have been murdered in SA as the total number of US GI's killed throughout the Vietnam War. ACDP spokesman Kenneth Mashoe points out that more policemen are being murdered than armed robbers shot while resisting arrest. In all, 73 police officers were killed last year. Since January 1 of this year, there have been 169 attacks on 386 policemen, 19 of them killed and 69 wounded.

With the police force now so heavily castrated, and with punishment at an all-time low (only nine in 101 murders results in a prison sentence) it can reasonably be asked: Are we going to sink without trace?

Unless there is a very rapid change in government attitudes to crime and punishment, the dire answer to that question in this fast-imploding country could all too easily be "yes." DP leader Tony Leon was derided by press and polls alike when he called on the President to declare a State of Emergency, even if this should be on a selective basis. Well, if this is not an emergency, I'd very much like to know what is.

In the meantime? Early answers would be: Far more draconian punishments; an immediate return - as the public demands - to capital punishment; the introduction of hard labour camps; even, possibly, a little less laughter about the increasingly attractive suggestion of tipping the villains down mine shafts.

And how to stiffen the police in their own growing emergency? Why not a Presidential May Day call to retired magistrates, detectives, prosecutors, experienced policemen and women and other trained personnel to serve as crisis staff to reinforce regular police officers in stemming the tide of crime? Otherwise? We shiver to think.

crying out in pain in the post-racist and post-colonial era and plead in this compassionate society to be liberated from the repression, cruelty and inhumanity of criminals." - Mr Justice O'Linn, in the Namibian High Court. O'Linn went on to quote an American jurist, Mr Justice Jackson: "The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between order with liberty and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrine with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact. An old proverb warns to take heed lest we walk into a well from looking at the stars."

Aida 205 Foundation .........

SOME years ago, APN tried hard to get a conservative think tank off the ground. Just when we were in sight of achieving our objective we were hit (this following an attack on then-State President F W de Klerk) with a retroactive donations tax going back almost to the time we were launched. Together with penalties and interest, this amounted to a good few hundreds of thousands of rand. That ended our dream of a think tank. Now a good friend in the Cape, Advocate Kieren O'Malley, has independently conceived a similar plan: something which is obviously most desperately needed in this most troubled SA of ours. He writes:

SOUTH AFRICA is on the skids. That is clear to all not blinded by liberal sentiment. With the adoption of the new constitution the country is well on the way to becoming a typical one-party African state. The ANC government is unable to fulfil its core functions of maintaining law and order and basic infrastructure, let alone fulfilling the extravagant election promises it made concerning jobs, education, health and other services.

The economy continues to fail to provide enough jobs to those streaming out of school. Unemployment continues to rise, with no immediate prospects of any improvement. The crime wave remains unchecked and the brain drain of the best educated and talented is picking up again. Official emigration figures are a joke. Most simply pack their bags and leave.

In the public service there is a lack of morale and standards drop everywhere. Hospitals are being closed down; the best teachers leave the profession in droves; the police are subjected to the public spectacle of the Minister of Safety & Security and his National Commissioner engaged in a slanging match in which they blame each other for the escalating crime wave. In the realm of justice, Allan Boesak returns to Cape Town to face charges of theft and is publicly welcomed by Justice Minister Dullah Omar.

Omar has also tabled a bill which will outlaw corporal punishment as a criminal sanction: this when the death penalty has already been declared unconstitutional by the politically correct Constitutional Court. Our prisons are overflowing. Abortion is now freely available at our hospitals and the government intends shortly to legalise homosexual marriages: homosexual adoptions having been tolerated for some time already. Universities and the media are dominated by politically correct egalitarians who denounce all standards and truths as "discriminatory." The culture is in decline.

There is an urgent need for a foundation which can research and articulate conservative solutions to the daunting problems facing SA: a foundation which can lay the groundwork for the revival and strengthening of sensible conservative ideas and values. Ideas such as limited government, self reliance, discipline and moral rectitude. Ideas currently in remarkably short supply in SA.

There is a need for a foundation or think tank which can define the interests of the family and traditional values: A foundation willing to adopt unpopular, politically-incorrect positions: not because of a perverse desire to be different, but because sensible conservative ideas and values are what SA needs in heavy doses right now. There is an unfortunate tendency to equate conservative ideas and values with the apartheid order. To be a conservative in SA has always been taken as supporting the apartheid system.

Conservatism as an ideology and ideal needs to distinguish itself from the apartheid era. For the apartheid era was in many ways a perversion of conservatism, properly understood. True conservatism is, for example, interested in merit and achievement, irrespective of race or colour. It has no truck with social engineering a la apartheid. Our universities, media and the overwhelming majority of NGO's form part of an ultra-liberal, politically correct constituency. A conservative foundation along the lines of the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation is needed to balance the picture.

Obviously, it need not be as large as these American counterparts but it must perform the same role in promoting conservative ideas superior to those peddled by the political, intellectual and cultural elite.

The vast majority of South Africans are socially conservative: one only has to look at opinion polls on abortion, the death penalty and issues such as homosexual marriage. Most South Africans are also conservative in that they prefer incremental change to the mindless transformation preached and practised by the ANC and its "progressive" supporters in the SACP and COSATU.

Most South Africans realise that the state is not an effective agent of social change, that civil society and not the state must lead change. A foundation (possibly a Foundation for Family Values and Public Ethics) needs to tap into this constituency, strengthen it and establish links with like-minded conservatives across the world.

SA cannot afford to be held hostage by liberal and socialist intellectuals and ideas when vast portions of the rest of the world are moving steadily in the other direction. It is time for SA to become a true member of the international community and not pursue outdated policies incongruent with developments elsewhere in the world.

**Those interested in such a think tank should write to Mr O'Malley c/o APN, address at back of newsletter. We will devote more attention to this later.

Aida 205 Flak .........

"CHINA? There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes, he will move the world."
- Napoleon.

US multinationals and their associated political globalists may see Clinton's new "engagement policy" with Red China as a "great leap forward." Others are not so sure. Sending US jobs, capital and technology to China is in line with the Kissingerian theory that such actions promote "democracy." Critics reply:

One who has his grave doubts is Congressman Gerald Solomon (Rep., New York), one of the few Republicans to have publicly discussed impeachment proceedings against Clinton. Solomon insists that mainland China remains a brutal authoritarian dictatorship; that the wholesale export of American jobs to China only assists in the creation of a formidable trade competitor; that in many ways Red China poses a far greater long-term threat to US security interests than the old USSR ever did.

"If ever a policy were out of touch with reality," he says, "it is our current policy of appeasement toward Communist China."

Considering the source, perhaps the most amazing (and best-reasoned) call for the US to tread warily in its new "engagement policy" appears in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, the quarterly journal of the New World Order-promoting Council on Foreign Relations.

In this, Richard Bernstein and Ross H Munro argue that the Kissinger ðemocratise-with-dollars "vision of China" is now obsolete, as it ignores many Chinese statements and actions that suggest the country is emerging as a great power rival of the US in the Pacific.

"Since the late 1980s Beijing leaders (especially those now in charge of national affairs) have set goals that are contrary to American interests. China's willingness, even eagerness, to improve the Sino/American mood represents a tactical gesture rather than a strategic one. China's deference reflects its continued interest in the burgeoning trade and technology transfer relationship with the US and its hope of quelling anti-Chinese sentiment in Congress and among the American public."

They quote an influential Chinese planner, General Mi Zhenyu, vice-commandant of the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing, who last year wrote: "For a long time it will be absolutely necessary that we quietly nurse our sense of vengeance. We must conceal our abilities and bide our time ..."

They continue: "China's close military cooperation with the former Soviet Union, particularly its purchases of advanced weapons in the almost unrestricted Russian arms bazaar, its technological and political help to the Islamic countries of Central Asia and North Africa, and its looming dominance in East Asia put it at the centre of an informal network of states, many of which have goals and philosophies inimical to those of the US, and many of which share China's sense of grievance at the long global domination of the West.

"The Gulf War had a jarring effect on the People's Liberation Army. Their shock led them to press for a rapid and expensive modernisation of China's armed forces, including further nuclear testing and long-range missile development. Almost every major study of Chinese military spending, whether conducted by the US Government or the International Institute for Strategic Studies, has concluded that actual spending is at least several times Beijing's official figure.

"China is now engaged in one of the most extensive and rapid military buildups in the world, one that has accelerated in recent months even as China's rhetoric has softened and Beijing has moved to improve its ties with the US. Even before the Straits of Taiwan incident, China was acquiring airborne early warning technology in Europe and Israel and developing its own in-flight refuelling techniques to extend the range of its warplanes.

"Since the Taiwan incident, it has sealed a deal with Russia to acquire two destroyers equipped with modern cruise missiles. In recent years, China has acquired SU-27 fighter-bombers and Russian Kilo-class submarines. In the last three years, China has built 34 modern warships on its own and developed a fleet of M-9 and M-11 mobile launched missiles of the sort fired near Taiwan.

"It has also expanded its rapid reaction force from 15 000 to 200 000 men. China is the only Asian country to deploy nuclear weapons and is the world's third-largest nuclear power in terms of the number of delivery vehicles in service. China's goals go a long way toward explaining its tactical attitude toward its relations with the US, where an annual trade imbalance approaching $40 billion has helped China finance its arms acquisitions.

"China's mercantilist policies, which include large-scale technology transfers from US sources and the purchase of dual-use technologies in the American market, are likely to become a major source of US/Sino conflict as Beijing prospers."

Others, too, urge the same cautionary stance and the danger of corporate greed. Questions being asked include:

**How should the US respond if Hong Kong's reversion to China on July 1 goes badly?

**Should China be allowed to enter the World Trade Organisation? China's economy hardly operates by text-book free market rules. It has, for instance, built itself up into the world's largest textile exporter: and is today the largest source of US clothing imports, all the time cheerfully evading international agreements into which it has entered to limit the volume of exports, this by trans-shipping through third countries and attaching false labels, such as "Made in Turkey."

**Fairly soon now, the US will have to decide whether China is prepared to live up to international trade norms. If China is not prepared to abide by all WTO rules, could this not undermine the whole WTO because of its size?

**Repeated high-level US complaints to Beijing over the widespread pirating of American copyright and protected material, the counterfeiting of videos, trade marks, compact designs and other "intellectual property" have by no means corrected the position.

**Beijing continues as a major violator of human rights. There is, in particular, the unacceptable problem of Chinese slave labour camps. Beijing remains the largest user of forced labour in the world: and shows little sign of mending its ways. The ingenuity of China's elite in exploiting forced labour seems to know no bounds. Skilled prisoners are now available for leasing to factories owned by foreign businessmen.

**Technically, US importers are forbidden to buy slave labour products, but they do it anyway, the authorities often winking at the practice on the phoney argument that the purchase of such goods somehow advances the cause of liberty; alternatively, that this is one key to keeping the Chicoms in a good mood.

**Not that their mood is all that good. They resolutely reject the notion of giving the slightest autonomy to the people of Tibet, whose land they occupy and whose religion they scorn and plunder with great brutality. How many other realities of life in communist China would shock the world were they shown on TV?

**Americans still believe they stand for something in the world. That something is freedom, dignity, human rights, the rule of law. There is a lot of US bombast about all those. Imagine the belly-laugh should Washington now try to come the heavy and tell the Chinese leaders they need to have more respect for "human rights" and "the rule of law"!

**Above all is the question of increasing Chinese military might. Beijing retains its grossly over-manned 3,2 million strong army. It continues to expand its nuclear potential, modernise its air and naval forces, all this intended to make it the biggest potential enemy of the US.

**US intelligence claims that China maintains an extensive biological warfare programme. Clinton himself has previously told the US Congress that China "likely maintains an offensive biological warfare programme." Recent reports indicate that Beijing has purchased 500 tons of the deadly nerve gas, Sarin, from the Ukraine. It is also reported that China is consulting officers and biological experts from former East German chemical units "to evaluate biological warfare conducted on islands." Which must give Taiwan pause.

**There are other problems. Not only is the Army emerging as the single most powerful institution in mainland China, but it also has ultimate political authority. Additionally it has created a large number of influential business enterprises. "Unlike the Soviet Union, China is not becoming a compelling military power founded on a pitifully weak economy, but a powerful economy creating a credible military force."

**Patrick E Taylor, reporting for The New York Times from Beijing, warns that "thousands of Chinese spies are active on every continent, seeking to buy or steal technology to support the country's military and space programmes."

Not a reassuring picture: but certainly one indicating how fast the world balance of power is changing, with China showing potential for becoming the most powerful nation on earth. Of course, we should not forget who gave China to the Communists in the first place. In the event you don't know: it was the US. To repeat, it all makes those Asian contributions to the Clinton presidential campaign look pretty good.

Aida 205 Filler Panel ......

"MIKEL Koliqi recently died at 95. His obituary, buried deep in The New York Post, was the first I'd heard of him. Actually, he had been Cardinal Koliqi since 1994. Between 1945 and 1986 he'd spent 38 years in Communist Albania's prisons and labour camps. God bless him and all matyred Christians who suffered in obscurity under Communism while the Western press splash South African apartheid on the front pages."

"Accused of keeping gold seized from Jews by the Nazis, Switzerland recently underwent its worst foreign policy crisis since WW2. Still, the heirs should be able to claim restitution. (As for Christians claiming restitution, good luck). Switzerland is also attacked for its neutrality in WW2. It should be honoured for refusing to join the most barbarous war of all time." US Catholic commentator, Joe Sobran.

Aida 205 China .........

WILL Bill Clinton, America's rogue president and the subject of a myriad tawdry scandals, not the least the manner in which his White House hustled Asian funding for last November's presidential election - be impeached? That question, radioactive in Washington just two months ago (see APN issue No 203), has now more or less subsided into an embarrassed whispering campaign.

Fearful that impeachment, with its consequent constitutional crisis, could finally precipitate the long-feared global financial blowout, neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown any great enthusiasm for a Watergate repeat. But now much bigger forces have come into play. More than 1 000 top US companies last month joined in a lobbying campaign seeking expanded US/China trade relations: and what they see as hugely profitable access to China's vast markets.

The very last thing US Big Business wants is to see Beijing angered by any stupid moral uproar over alleged illegal campaign gifts. These companies have accordingly set up the new, already immensely influential Business Coalition for US/China Trade.

Multinationals prominently involved include such familiar names as Coca-Cola, General Motors, Boeing, General Electric, IBM, Chase Manhattan, Phillip Morris, Atlantic Richfield, AT&T, Time Warner, Chevron, Bristol-Myers Squib, Pfizer, GSX Corporation, Bechtel, American Express, United Technological Group. The $26 billion insurance conglomerate, American International Group, is a leading organiser of the multi-million lobbying campaign.

Simultaneously, a separate $750 000-a-year grassroots public relations campaign to boost China's image through the Internet, schools and community organisations has been launched by six major corporate backers. Sole purpose of this new PR campaign, entitled the US/China Education Foundation, is to bolster commercial relations with Beijing. If these major multinationals can't save Clinton's shabby hide, who can?

Not only Big Bucks, but also some mighty Big Names, support this business initiative. When it comes to bonding with Beijing few names come higher than former President George Bush; former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the prominent Reaganite Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig.

Other former Secretaries of State who have made the profit-seeking pilgrimage to the Forbidden City include Edmund Muskie, Cyrus Vance, George Shultz, Lawrence Eagleburger and Warren Christopher. All now have business ties of some sort with Beijing.

Add to these former Secretary of Defence, Dick Cheney; former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft; former US Trade Representative Carla Hill; former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker; former Ambassador to China Leonard Woodcock; former US Trade Representative Robert Strauss and former Senator Gary Hart.

All these political mandarins are employed by, or serve as, lawyers, advisors or consultants to US companies that have invested, or want to invest, in China. American officials use these former officials to gain access to top Chinese officials who would otherwise be reluctant to grant access to businessmen or bankers: people whom they, with their enormous Chinese pride, despise as hucksters and shopkeepers.

Not surprisingly, all these globalist lawyers and lobbyists are almost without exception members in good standing of the New York-based, New World Order-supporting CFR (Council on Foreign Relations). Their advantage is not only that their political prestige can open doors in Beijing, but they can also play an important role in shaping opinion in Washington itself.

The Clinton Administration began a serious, high-level engagement with Beijing last year. Last month Vice President Al Gore was on hand in Beijing as China signed lucrative deals with Boeing and General Motors. China's civil aviation authorities will buy five Boeing passenger jets for $685 million and, in a $1,3 billion joint venture with a Chinese car manufacturer, General Motors will manufacture 100 000 new cars a year in China.

Gore, whose visit represented the highest-level US presence in Beijing in eight years, made Washington's position blindingly clear. He said his "overriding mission was to demonstrate that the US/ China relationship was maturing to a level of understanding that would allow cordial daily relations."

Even more explicitly he added in his oleaginous toast to his hosts: "This mission would not be derailed by allegations that China tried to funnel money illegally into last year's US elections." Orwell's observation comes to mind: "In our time, political speech ... is largely the defence of the indefensible." Republican leaders who now go along with all this include Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Tom Delay and Trent Lott.

Writing in The New Republic, John B Judiss commented: "Increasingly, many of our most distinguished and, in theory, disinterested experts on US/China policy are selling their reputations and knowledge to clients with very particular business interests in China. Most of them are Republicans." That's understandable. It was a Republican leader, Richard Nixon, who first opened the Chinese connection in 1972.

The classic China hand is, of course, Kissinger, long the Chinese Government's most prestigious defender. In 1987, at the behest of Beijing, he founded his own lobby in the American China Society, which he ran out of Kissinger Associates. After the Tiananmen Square massacre of protesting students, Kissinger publicly defended Beijing's action and opposed the call for US sanctions.

Alexander Haig has also been notable for his unflagging defence of Chinese actions. In October 1989, four months after Chinese tanks crushed the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, he was the only American to join the late Deng Xiaopeng in that same square for the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the ludicrously misnamed People's Republic.

Haig currently serves as "honorary senior advisor" to China's government-controlled maritime operation, the Chinese Ocean Shipping Co (COSCO), a company with a recent very checkered record. COSCO is currently very much in the news in the US, having been granted - free of charge, and on the direct intervention of the White House - use of the disused, $300 million US Navy facilities at Long Beach, California.

This historic base, encompassing prime port space, is to be converted to a major cargo terminal to receive ships carrying thousands of containers of garments, footwear, toys, sports goods, video equipment, cameras, electronics and building materials manufactured in China. All of it in direct competition with US manufacturers and shipping.

In 1992 COSCO was fined $400 000 on charges of violating US shipping laws by paying kickbacks to shippers instead of abiding by published tariffs. In 1992 US Navy ships stopped a COSCO vessel in the Persian Gulf, after US intelligence warned it might be carrying chemical weapons material. Within the last year, six COSCO ships have been detained for violating international safety regulations.

Whether morally acceptable or not, America's ardent wooing of Red China, in terms of cold pragmatism, makes commercial sense. One fourth of all people alive today live in China. You can well understand GM, Boeing, Coca-Cola and the rest, all desperate for new markets, salivating at the thought of access to 25% of the world's consumers. At present rate of economic growth (minimum 9% p.a.) China should have the world's largest economy by 2010.

Not to be ignored, either, are the Asian giant's abysmally low labour costs, still just 10% to 15% of those in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, although on a par with those of India. And none of that takes into consideration the almost cost-free production of the 19-million Chinese in forced labour camps.

That's the size of the issue: and you can bet your last chopstick that it is markets, not morals, which dictate US corporate policies. So ... summing up, it seems that all those million $ gifts from the Asian philanthropists to the Democratic election campaign are paying off, handsomely. And, of course, it is obviously easier to vent a sense of moral outrage on an economic dwarf, such as SA, than on a political colossus.

As Bertolt Brecht so memorably put it, a full belly comes first and morality second.

Aida 205 Panel with "China" ......

Aida 205 Books .........

THAT excellent Australian publication, Bob Santamaria's News Weekly, has recently resuscitated the writings of one of the great intellects of the early 20^th Century: Tomas Masaryk, the formidable Czech statesman. It was Masaryk who, coincident with the rise of universal education, socialism, communism and egalitarianism, warned that the ethos of the West was declining.

This he blamed on what he termed the "half-educated." Modern man, he said, was being detached from traditional morals, ethics, discipline, justice, law and order, from faith in God and the Church, by those who could see just far enough to question and reject the permanent things, but not far enough to understand the need to defend, justify and protect such values and standards.

He warned that the main effect of the small doses of education generally administered to Western societies in his day (and, equally, in our own) was to destroy belief in "the past," to question and scorn all authority, to inject contempt and mockery for the values of their forefathers.

"The half-educated ignore or have never known that the true task of criticism is to discern and conserve what is valuable in a work, an age, a tradition, the culture of the past, that the duty of the cultivated man is not to disintegrate the world, but to restore it. Disparagement is much easier than discernment ... and is the chief weapon of the half-educated, who fear the truly educated.

"Bad education always drives out the good. Where wisdom and prudence once reigned, scepticism and triviality ravage unchallenged." Much the same theme inspired George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In this, he talked of a world in which fact became inseparable from fiction: "the corruption and perversion of language purged of humanity and intended to make the telling of truth impossible: where 'War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.'" As Orwell said elsewhere, "the words fall like soft snow to cover the meaning" and, more succinctly, "the dead idea of egalitarianism is now putrefying both the world's mind and the world's body."

How much the world has become like Nineteen Eighty-Four! The whole world is awash in the distortion of reality, the crux of Orwell's message. Newspeak or Doublethink words and phrases abound, as words and phrases confuse by equating diametric opposites and turn reality inside out.

Communist revolutionaries call their cause "liberation movements," yet all know they are designed to impose socialist, totalitarian or semi-totalitarian regimes on those they have "liberated." Then there is that strange concoction, "human rights," which clearly does not include property rights, the right to real freedom, free expression of religion, the rights of the unborn. On the latter, there is the brain-numbing description "pro-choice," for those who would leave it up to the mother or doctor to decide whether to murder the unborn.

Masaryk and Orwell alike defined this age of destructive and hysterical nihilism with stunning precision: an age prostrating itself at the altar of egalitarianism, of the Common Man, who has proved to be very common indeed. In other words, we have - with the eager assistance of the mass media, TV, Hollywood, radio and the magazine racks - created a world in which the deformed (the spiritually deformed) survive the best.

No surer sign of a demented civilisation could be presented than the fact that unhealthy, semi-literate misfits, absurd creatures such as Madonna, the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Queen, Alice Cooper, Roseanne and all the other scare-the-bourgeoisie Neanderthals are massively enriched and on all sides treated like gods. As the late Professor Alan Bloom put it, this entertainment of the damned, malicious, sick and cynical, "rots the brain." Yet everywhere we drown in increasingly bold hardcore porn (although there seems to be some unwritten law against hardcore anti-communism).

Now we come right up to date: to two remarkable books just published, both by US associates of APN. The first is Lawrence Dawson's The Death of Reality: How a Conspiracy of Fools Has Laid Claim to the Destiny of This Nation, (Paradigm Publishing, Box 45161, Boise, VD 83711, USA, US price $17,95). I have not yet seen Dawson's published work, but I did see some of the early chapters. I will quote from these:

"This book is dedicated to a single proposition. A conspiracy of fools has laid claim to the destiny of this nation. They are merrily laying an axe to the root of Western culture, thinking that all humanity will live harmoniously among the shattered and fallen deadwood. They have been at it for thirty years and all they have produced is barbarism.

"The amazing thing about all this is that so few outside the religious community have noticed what has occurred. The evidence was there for all to see, in the total collapse of morality and loss of family loyalty; in the generation of American women who have slaughtered their offspring with a cold-blooded ruthlessness; in the primitive styles of the youth which seem more natural to a jungle or a pirate's lair; in the casual killing by inner-city youth, symbolised by random and anonymous drive-by shootings.

"Something has short-circuited the ability of many Americans to comprehend what has happened to them. The relations between the sexes is degenerating to promiscuous loneliness, bitter hostility and superficial pretensions. They do not see this because they think of it as 'liberation' from social constraints.

"A massive crime against the next generation is committed. It requires that a woman first execute her best instincts, her natural desire to nurture and protect her young. They do not see what it means because they have become entangled in an unnatural belief. They think of it as sustaining the pleasantries of their lives and their freedom of action.

"The children who do survive the abortion gauntlet are left to stumble without guidance. They are encouraged to 'experiment' and to trash their own heritage. Left without direction, they have reinvented savagery. This is not recognised because primitive styles are considered 'innovative' and vulgar actions are considered daring advances.

"The rapid victories of decadence and cultural anarchy since the 1960s is a phenomenon which has occasioned much comment from groups resisting the new 'values,' especially from Christian and conservative circles. The advocates of decadence, however, have immunised themselves from such criticism primarily by a method which has seldom been noticed or commented upon by the critics. The decadence is defended by a type of mental aberration which neutralises such criticism.

"The aberration consists of a systematic denial of reality. The negative consequences of the decadence are ignored by the simple expedient of treating such facts as if they were only the opinion of the detested 'right wing.' When critics, for example, point out that sex education in government schools only increased pregnancy and abortion rates, these facts are considered 'irrelevant' because they are advanced by the 'Christian right.'

"Similarly, the correct observation that AIDS in the US is largely a homosexual disease is called 'homophobic.' People are publicly required to accept the illusion that the AIDS infected are 'innocent' sufferers who in no way contributed to their own infections. We are expected to disavow all reason and reality by mentally holding the absurd position that the homosexual AIDS patient was 'randomly' struck and that his disease does not reflect on his sexual conduct. Reality dies in a conspiracy of foolishness.

"To successfully break the foundations of Western culture, one which produced all that is superior in Western art and science, is itself an amazing feat. It represents an intellectual revolution of major proportion, one akin to the Reformation, the Renaissance or the apparent victory of Darwinism. That such a revolution could occur without the public being conscious of it strains our ability to believe. But that is exactly what has occurred.

"For, you see, the attack came not directly against our commitment to objective reality. It came by stealth. It came as an attack upon our language, as a subtle redefinition of what our language is. By accepting that redefinition of language, often without realising that we had done so, our commitment to objective reality also fell. It fell silently and outside our consciousness. And that is a story worth telling ..."

Indeed it is. The second work is Hilmar von Campe's Moral Meltdown - The Core of Globalism, (Prescott Press, P O Box 53788, Lafayette, Louisiana 70505.) Hilmar, a long-time friend of your publisher, is a German WW2 veteran, a former prisoner-of-war in Yugoslavia, a graduate of the University of Hamburg, who went on to become a highly successful businessman in the US. In his book, he discusses the present-day cultural wars, how the degradation of morality and ethical values continues to plague society and disrupt the social order of nations.

He recalls that journo John Reston once asked President John Kennedy how he imagined the world should be and what vision he had of the future. Kennedy's reply: "I have not yet had time to think about it." Hilmar's comment: "There could scarcely be a clearer expression of the aimlessness of Western leaders and societies.

"Kennedy was a virtuoso in controlling the political machinery of the US. He delivered the most moving speeches. Countless Americans voted for him, fascinated by the personality of this representative of a new generation of political leaders. But neither they nor the President of the strongest nation in the free world had the slightest idea where mankind should be heading.

"When Kennedy accepted his nomination as Democratic presidential candidate before some 80 000 people in the Los Angeles Colosseum, his speech was loaded with expressions such as 'new frontier,' 'challenge,' 'undiscovered areas of science and space exploration' and 'war and peace,' which brought him the same thunderous applause as greeted Joseph Goebbels at the Berlin Sports Palace. 'Fantastic,' commented a spectator.

"But what did it all mean? Goebbels had a clearer idea than Kennedy of the view he envisaged for the world. Listening to the dozen or so US presidential candidates in the late Eighties and early Nineties, one is unfortunately forced to conclude that their ideas are even less adequate than Kennedys. We proclaim democracy, but this proclamation means as much as the proclamation of Christianity by most Christians.

"Valclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, defined the role of lies. 'Life is entangled in a web of hypocrisy and lies. The power of the bureaucracy is called the power of the people; the working class is being enslaved in the name of the working class; the total humiliation of man is defended as the ultimate liberation of man; shutting off information is proclaimed to be free information; the manipulation through power calls itself public control of power; abuse is named adherence to legal order; the suppression of culture is presented as its development; the joke of a superficial election process becomes the serious form of democracy.

"'State power must falsify because it is the prisoner of its own lies; it falsifies past, present and future and falsifies statistical facts. It pretends not to persecute anybody; it pretends not to be afraid; it pretends not to pretend anything.'"

Hilmar adds: "The free Western world is becoming increasingly remote from the truths on which it was originally founded and is turning to lies. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief of lies, was a master of packaging lies, to make dirt appear beautiful and so incite the Germans to follow a suicide path. He would be very pleased to look at our society of today.

"Our lies, like his, appear in the shining light of beauty, pretending to represent the best of contemporary thinking, creating the illusion of progress and salvation, that finally after such a long time of failure, we are now achieving what is good for people. We call freedom of choice what is in reality the right to kill. The refined ability to manipulate voters for profit becomes the democratic process. We say lifestyle to perversion and claim selfishness to be in the national interest.

"An existential lie develops out of a series of lies, first toward one self and then towards others, until in the end lying becomes a habit. There are people who are deeply convinced that they are benefactors to others and to society, while in reality they are ruthless crooks. There is no difference between a Nazi or a communist liar and a liar in democracy. It is all a theatre of lies, a musty bowl of lies covering our world ..."

Masaryk issued his first warning in 1897. Dawson and Von Campe are writing in 1997. For 100 years these philosophers have clearly discerned the ever-growing tragedy of Western culture. But who, then or now, listens? Instead we continue with our shabby politics and grimy moral poverty; hail the reign of the anti-Christ; the overthrow of the normal by the abnormal; accept the total corruption of man and society; watch all civilised norms for mankind defied and defiled. And what has it brought us? To one of the most evil times in all history.

Aida 205 Snippets .............

IN early April Rabbi Yossy Goldman of the SA Rabbinical Association said that SA is "in a state of anarchy," and that it was "immoral for the government not to protect its citizens against crime." In such failure, he reiterated, the government "was not incompetent, not inept, but immoral. SA citizens are paying taxes for safety, security and defence, but are too afraid to walk the streets." The government should "if necessary, put the defence force on the streets."

RABBI Cyril Harris, chief rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Synagony of SA, says "... the situation is so bad that the silent majority of law-abiding citizens must now become highly vociferous and demand from the authorities a response towards crime fighting directly in line with the enormity of the problem and the widespread suffering it is causing."

VIOLENT, US-style bank shootouts are threatening to displace armed hijackings as SA Crime No 1. Over the past six weeks, Johannesburg has seen no less than 23 bank holdups, most linked by the police to four highly organised gangs with connections to international syndicates. A study by internal security divisions of the banks shows that they have suffered 150 armed robberies from October 1995 to September 1996, 50 more than in the preceding ten years. Police estimate that country-wide total bank robberies hit 600 last year. Arrest rates and amounts stolen are not known. According to the Mail & Guardian, police and the banks agreed last year to withhold such information, apparently because of fears that releasing details of the police's low success rate would encourage more robberies.

BANK robberies are a growing worldwide problem, but there are very few countries where senseless slaughter is a frequent factor in such hold-ups. In one particularly bloody shoot-out at the Randburg Mall Volkskas branch this month, three people were killed and eight wounded. Bob Tucker, chief executive of COSAB (Council of SA Banks) was quoted: "There is nothing sophisticated about the robberies. It is just brutal: an unbelievably callous attitude to the lives of all South Africans."

SINCE the beginning of the year, 31 Gauteng post offices have been hit by armed robberies, with two people shot dead and an unknown number injured. More than 20 have been pillaged and more than R5 million stolen in the last month.

COMMERCIAL farmers of the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU) are threatening to set up their own security if the government does not curb the growing number of criminal attacks on White farms. Herman Vercueil, chairman of TAU's security committee, representing more than 8 000 commercial farmers in four provinces, has urged the government to give the police and army more power to combat crime in the rural areas. Last year notched up hundreds of attacks on farms and smallholdings across the country, with more than 100 farmers murdered. Vercueil said: "Murder, armed robbery and rape are increasing in the rural areas. Our impression is that the government does not have the power or the will to stop the lawlessness."

COMMERCIAL crime is also going through the roof. The big Johannesburg-based JD retailing group announced in its report for the financial year to June 1996 it had experienced 355 burglaries, 81 hijackings, 11 armed robberies and the deaths of several of its security personnel. Executive chairman David Sussman said the figures had since declined, but the group still spent R20 million a year on crime prevention and trauma treatment.

THE security organisation, Fidelity Guards Holdings, reports that security measures, which include arming its vehicles, providing bullet-proof vests, firearms, insurance and funeral services, costs them R50 million a year, or 10% of annual sales. Last year, between 30 and 40 people employed in the cash moving industry were killed, down from 40 to 50 in 1995 because of the introduction of bullet proof vests and AK-47 protection of vehicles.

PICK 'n Pay's Board of Directors has just decided to provide each of its 130 outlets across the country with armed guards, morning and evening, at a cost of R8 million. This company already pays R2 million a year for trauma counselling of staff. In one recent week, the chain experienced five armed robberies in a row.

Aida 205 Storey .............

IN 1993 an American professor, Allan Carlson, wrote an instant best seller, What Has Government Done to Our Families? Well might we in SA ask the same question. To date, the Mandela Government's main achievements vis-a-vis the family have been to tax it to death; encourage immorality via pornography, abortion and homosexuality; wreck the education system and drive public religious expression back to the catacombs.

Next on the list, seemingly, is legalisation of prostitution and red light areas, soft drugs and euthanasia. All this coinciding with a very unfriendly economic environment, mass unemployment, an unchecked crime rate that has brought anguish and terror to millions, a society marred by thousands of broken homes, homeless children, one-parent families, homosexual liaisons, child abuse and juvenile delinquency.

In short, SA has since 1994 undergone a social and moral revolution, some very crude social engineering. All indicators of massive social breakdown are now in place: a very tough time for kids and parents alike. Distressing to many in this crisis has been the long, eerie silence of the mainline churches. Happily, help is at hand.

With the help of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Natal-based Christian Coalition has produced an excellent 96-page booklet, Contract With the Sough African Family, spelling out the Christian message on the building and safeguarding of the family unit. They make no bones about the fact that they present a culturally conservative/traditional Christian agenda.

The Contract's stated objectives are: To cultivate within society an appreciation for and understanding of the family as the fundamental and essential unit of society, to strengthen relations between parents and children. They argue, as do most sociologists today, that the traditional family is the foundation of society and the source of a child's identity.

In their view, the family, not the government, gives and nutures life. The family is the chief educational institution, more so today than ever before with our schools now bogged down in unworkable experiments. The family sets standards of right and wrong. The basic message: that when the family is well, society is well. When the family suffers (as here and now) the whole of society suffers. What they envisage in particular is a vast national effort to repair our Black families, giving priority to the issues of teenage pregnancy and female-headed households.

All pretty sound common sense, of which we hear far too little today. All the more astonishing then that this extremely worthwhile effort should suffer a tremendous pasting, intemperate and malicious, from none other than Bishop Peter Storey of the Methodist Church. Writing in The Sunday Independent, he hacked away at the booklet as "a breathlessly arrogant and bizarre document ... rightwing ideology ... a turgid justification of rightwing obsessions (which) denounce everything that might be constructed as liberal religious, ethical and political thought." Right there you have the rub. They've hit on a liberal nerve.

Well, no one can say Storey is not liberal, politically correct to his fingertips. Some while ago, you may remember, he launched his passionate, well-publicised Gun Free SA campaign, this at the very time that we were suffering the greatest explosion of violent crime, rape, murder and armed robbery in the country's history. Needless to say, Storey's efforts received a very lukewarm response from law-abiding citizens, who failed to see that this was the time to disarm. We have heard little about this particular passage into p.c. country since.

If he bombed with Gun Free SA, Storey has also bombed on this. It is sad that a fellow Christian can offer only such an uncreative and hostile approach on a matter of such vital public importance. I say, blessings on the Christian Coalition for a job well done. And so, apparently, say many others. Already the campaign has attracted the wholehearted support of many churches, Black and White, with congregations running into quite a few million. And it is early days yet.

For further information on the booklet (still in draft form) and the campaign generally, contact Christian Coalition, P O Box 291, Linkhills, 3652, KZN, telephone 031-763-3739/24; fax 031-763-3739. Cost of the booklet is R20.

Aida 205 Anglicans .........

POOR old Church of England! According to the London Daily Mail, which tends to keep a watch on these things, the Bishop of Jarrow, the Rt Rev Alan Smithson, made a sacrifice for Lent: as indeed could be expected of a leading Christian. "But his choice, to give up reading the Bible and study the Koran instead, has made him the target of fierce criticism."

According to the Mail, Smithson read up to 20 pages of the words of the Prophet each day in an effort to finish the book in the 40 days of Lent. He says he may include in services some of the wisdom he discovered in Muslim's sacred book.

But, who knows? Smithson was perhaps just a wee bit ahead of his time. A new thrust now under way in the UK is described as "the biggest expression of religious faith witnessed in Britain for centuries." Alas, it is not a Christian revival, but the steadily encroaching march of Islam. The building of 100 new mosques, planned over the next three years, should add an exotic touch to the British urban scene.

As Auberon Waugh comments, one wonders how long it will be before Islam is recognised as the dominant religion in Her Majesty's green and pleasant land? Unfortunately, our beloved CoE is too preoccupied with other matters to pay much attention. In the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral, the Dean and Chapter are anxious to establish an ice-cream kiosk, also selling coffee and sandwiches, this to the ferocious opposition of local traders.

At the same time, the London Sunday Times reports that a recent poll disclosed that 66% of Anglican priests could not list the Ten Commandments at first go. Most of those polled could just remember the Sixth, Ninth and Tenth Commandment, which forbid adultery, coveting and greed. In conformity with current CoE teaching, 21% did not believe in the devil or Hell, while 5% doubted that Jesus performed any miracles during his lifetime.

But, perhaps, in an increasingly illiterate Britain, where public education (exactly as in Mr Mandela's New SA) has almost collapsed, none of this should surprise. Instead of worrying about ice-cream kiosks, maybe the good fathers should be discussing these matters.

Aida 205 Letter .........

I never cease to be amazed at the warm-hearted generosity of so many South Africans. A few days ago German friends living at Northcliff, whose children are leaving SA for safer climes, delivered a full truckload of clothing and shoes, all in tiptop condition, to us for our hardluck Afrikaner kiddies. When thanking them, I mentioned we were hoping to buy winter blankets for distribution next month. The very next morning the husband phoned me. Driving to work, on one of our unusually bitter, rainy autumn days, he had passed some of our poor little mites, barefoot and poorly clad. "Tell me how much your blankets are going to cost, and we'll help you," he said.

We have been fortunate this month. A very good friend gave us a ton of cartonised, energised fruit juice for distribution to schools, churches and families in distressed areas. Many, many thanks to him: and to the friend who lent us a truck to pick it all up. We must also again thank our old friends at the Rembrandt Butchery in Linden. Not only do they give us packets of soup meat for the food parcels made up for needy families, but they too lent us a truck to pick up several thousand frozen pies, biscuits and cheeseburgers we bought at a very special price from a factory near Hartbeespoort, now closing down.

Thanks too to a marvellous lady, who has helped us many times in the past, and who has just delivered two very big packages of hand knitted jerseys she has made for our deprived families. And, finally, our deep gratitude to those who have given us cash gifts. Believe me, we do not like, in these very hard times, to ask for funding, but we do need it so desperately. There are so many hungry kiddies out there now looking to us for help
- I just wish we could do far more. Should you wish to help, please do not make your cheques out to APN, but direct them to Mission Rescue, Volkskas Bank, Northcliff, account no 07381 75 166. Thank you and God bless your kind hearts.